Having decided that for my own purposes the SQL Search module still outshines Drupal Search, and that it has the added advantage that I could change it as I please if I took power (!!) I have offered to continue supporting SQL Search, and notably to migrate it to 4.7. This turned out to be a longer job than I had hoped - but I should be able in the next few weeks to make a first 4.7-compatible version available. Here are some of the features and limitations planned in this release:

1) Simplified the types of search: trip_search will only support fulltext indexing - in pgsql this means REGEXP but since I only use mysql for the moment, then somebody else will have to provide the REGEXP if they need it.
"Basic search" will no longer be allowed, since it killed performance and nearly got me thrown off the server!

2) Filter on user, being able to exclude certain users.

3) Idem for taxonomy categories.

4) Be able to choose which filters are available or not and make this coherent with the advanced search form.

5) Excludes will work properly (in 4.6 mysql fulltext excludes only work if there are other search criteria as well)

6) You will be able to include single quotes in the text you search for (important in French: a search on my site crashed when somebody tried to find "procès d'animaux").

Future plans
I am very interested in improving the relevance of the search results. I may in a later version see if I can try to improve the returned
results by using the relevance score generated in mysql as well as the relevance built into trip_search already. I may also try to provide the possibility of searching on publication date.

Comments

jasonwhat’s picture

jasonwhat commented

Thanks for updating. There are several features in trip search that did not make it into core. One that I've been after is the ability to create several restricted searches to create things like job boards, or event searches. However, I think adding more dedicated searching to the views module, which already filters content and seems to be moving towards being a major part of Drupal, might be a better way to go. What do you think?

joel_guesclin’s picture

joel_guesclin commented

If I understand the question correctly, the idea would be to allow "saved searches". I think this would be a very useful idea, however it would be a fairly heavy load to program and I'm afraid that this would be beyond me at the moment, since it is not an immediate need for my own site. So the short answer for now is "in principle great idea, in practice please don't hold your breath"!

mindless’s picture

mindless commented
Status: Active » Closed (fixed)